Highway

Installation (5 wooden pieces painted with car lacquer)
Dimensions variable

Color compositions associated to traffic or warning signals appear frequently as visual codes that invade landscape. Red-White, Orange-White, Yellow-Black, Yellow-White, Black-White: these combinations invade all places inhabited by men; they swarm through streets in official or informal signaling —on streets and sidewalks, on signs, advertisement, walls, posters or painted rocks and cement lumps— and extend all over roads that go through valleys and mountains, getting denser once again in towns and cities. These warning signals expand through the landscape as men colonize spaces, as if they were a replacement for displaced natural elements. Men carry along the message of an imminent danger, of a latent risk. These compositions of color bands, lines, arrows, crosses, letters or plains, interest me as a memento mori, constant remembrances of lifes’s fragility and death’s inevitability. For these works I used fragments of dead native vegetation found in woods near Bogotá (Colombia) that are logged for urbanism. I select these thin, large and spiraled branches because of their fragility and odd forms, as if they were part of a mutant nature. I painted these fragments with the mentioned color combinations, using car laquer, converging the controlled, strict and artificial character of the painting, with the light, fragile and organic character of the branches.